Yale University

Shield of Yale's Pauli Murray College

Protests by students, faculty and staff propelled Yale University to review the name of one of its residential colleges, Calhoun. As Prof. Tina Lu, the head of the new Pauli Murray College, noted in her talk at Duke, residential colleges are at the center of the university’s undergraduate life. New Haven’s vibrant African-American community had been concerned about the Calhoun name for years. “Community activists and student activists had very convergent interests,” Lu noted.

In 1933, when Yale created its first dormitories, the college named the building for U.S. vice president, secretary of state, secretary of war and South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, a leading slavery advocate. Calhoun, who graduated from Yale in 1804, owned enslaved people and famously asserted that slavery was a "positive good,” benefiting both slaves and slave owners.

Organized protests against the Calhoun name started in the late 1980s, when some students began referring to the building, which featured stained glass depictions of enslaved people carrying bales of cotton, as “Calhoun Plantation.” One stained-glass window showed an enslaved man in shackles kneeling at Calhoun’s feet.

Then-Master Prof. Jonathan Holloway, a black professor of African-American history, argued at the time that the name should remain “as an open sore, frankly, for the very purpose of having conversations about this. I’ve seen too many instances where Americans have very happily allowed themselves to be amnesiac and changed the name of something and walked away.” Protests took on renewed vigor in the wake of the 2015 attack in Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church. While Yale students pressed for Calhoun’s name to be removed, alumni largely opposed any change. In the words of one alumnus, retaining the Calhoun name was to “accept the wide range of humanity and recognize that we are all situated in a particular historical reality.”

In 2016, Yale President Peter Salovey reasserted that the university would not change the Calhoun name. In a letter to the Yale community, Salovey wrote, “Retaining the name forces us to learn anew and confront one of the most disturbing aspects of Yale’s and our nation’s past. I believe this is our obligation as an educational institution.”

At the same time, the university announced that it would no longer refer to faculty at the residential colleges as “masters.” Two new residential colleges would be named for Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray, a Durham native and human rights leader who was the first African American to graduate from Yale Law School in 1965.

The decision fueled controversy and more debate. Yale professor Matthew Jacobson wrote an open response to Salovey, who is Jewish, challenging him to ask “how it might feel to go to school and be assigned to a residential college named for Joseph Goebbels.” Yale professor Glenda Gilmore also advocated for a name change, citing “the pain inflicted every day on students who live in a dormitory named for a man distinguished by being one of the country’s most egregious racists.”

Apart from the protests, Calhoun staff member Corey Menafee smashed a stained-glass panel in the Calhoun dining hall that showed enslaved people carrying baskets of cotton. Menafee was fired, then rehired. “It’s 2016; I shouldn’t have to come to work and see things like that,” Menafee told reporters after the incident.

In the wake of protests, President Salovey convened a committee of faculty, students and staff to discuss principles to guide the university in deciding whether to remove a historical name from a building or other prominent structure or space on campus. As Prof. Lu points out, the decision to revisit the names was not an inclusive, open one, but was made by the Yale Corporation, made up of university trustees. “At one point, students protested by throwing Monopoly during an event,” to show their disdain for a process too dependent on the university’s image and donors.

Ultimately, Yale chose to remove Calhoun’s name from the college and replace it with Grace Murray Hopper, a computer scientist and Yale alumna who had served as a rear admiral in the US Navy.

Yale continues to promote faculty scholarship and archival materials related to slavery. However, at the time of this writing, we are aware of no further efforts by Yale University to engage with its many ties to slavery, including exploring the history of namesake Elihu Yale. Yale was a successful slave trader for the East India Company and profited from a booming trade in human beings that “was larger in duration and scope than its Atlantic counterpart,” according to Yale PhD student Joseph Yanielli. Those profits were what made him able to financially support the precursor to Yale University. ​As importantly, Yale engaged in the slave trade even as world opposition to slavery grew. A largely unacknowledged aspect to this debate is that opposition to slavery was as present as support for slavery during these times, albeit with less financial backing. Yanielli notes that in 1688, less than a year after Yale became governor of the state of Madras, a group of Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, issued a statement condemning slavery in the colonies. When Yale College honored Yale by renaming the institution, opposition to slavery was widespread across the British Empire.